


On My Right Shoulder

by Sans_Souci



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, Implied Violence, Kinks, Mind Games, Other, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Points of View, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Series Spoilers, Spoilers, Unhealthy Relationships, implied drug addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:41:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sans_Souci/pseuds/Sans_Souci
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was all so simple, at the end. Just a matter of choices, really. Three points of view during the power play that was the finale. Spoilers for Season 1 Finale “The Woman/Heroine”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Fearful Symmetry

**Author's Note:**

> I am having all the feels while recovering from a cold and being swamped by work. Fic is a natural outcome.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He had not been himself. But Sherlock was man enough to admit that he might not have managed to set the trap in the state he was in. Shot in the shoulder, going to pieces, hankering for relief--sweet relief in small little easy to swallow packages.

But she was there, as always, to point out the obvious.

He had to lose. _Of course._

Watson was looking at him in that worried, school teacher-like way even after he had insulted her because he was letting the case get to him. Acting like such a _child_. Under normal circumstances, he would have been infuriated at being condescended to in such a fashion.

But Watson was brilliant in her own fashion. Just one face-to-face meeting with Moriarty--the real one and not the fiction named Irene Adler--and she could read her like a book.

_You have to let her win._

Watson had solved it. In order to win, they had to lose.

_Ta-dah._

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Naturally, it would have to be him doing the legwork all on his own. Watson could not be there, of course, but she trusted him to be in close contact with the instruments of his self-destruction without falling back down that hole.

_You can do it._

So he did it, leaving a trail a child could follow.

 _Sloppy, sloppy . . ._ Why in the world would anyone need to _talk_ when beating up a drug dealer? In front of _witnesses_ too. But they were sure that Moriarty had their phones monitored. Had the NYPD phone lines bugged. Had her own agents inside the force. So they had to make it look real.

The hardest part had been finding a suitable drug dealer in out the open and near potential witnesses. Getting the drop on him, as the Americans so quaintly put it, had been easy. Easier than losing his security detail.

It worked. He knew what it looked like. The ex-addict, breaking free of his sober companion’s influence, imploding and overdosing. Easily identified by his accent and his arm in a sling.

It painted a picture of a once-brilliant man losing it. Losing control. Losing hope. It had been the best he could manage at such short notice, but it was believable because he had done it before. There was a _pattern_ he could follow.

Holding the baggie, the syringe and assorted paraphernalia he had lifted off the drug dealer in the bathroom, he was secretly relieved that he felt absolutely no compunction to use them. Not the usual way they were used, of course.

He could trust Detective Bell and Captain Gregson to play along. Trust that Watson would play her role and do that rushing to the hospital and fretting thing that she did so well. So he made it look real with the tourniquet and the used syringe. Even left the needle-mark for the paramedics to find.

Then they played the waiting game. Watson was glad. She felt he should have been prone on a hospital bed from the moment he had been shot, but that was the doctor in her for you. Ex-doctors and ex-sober companions. But she was his equal now. His partner. He could trust her.

He slept while Watson and Gregson conversed in low voices outside his ward, knowing that he had a few hours before the finale. There would be a minimal police presence to keep up the pretence. He _had_ assaulted a drug dealer after all.

His body needed the rest and they had stitched his wound closed since he was not about to open it again. Watson would not leave him for the first few days and Moriarty would not approach him until the coast was clear. She ought to be slightly flattered that a criminal mastermind was wary of her. As Moriarty _ought_ be when Joan Watson’s protective instincts were roused.

It was always the mistake of hyper-intelligent people to underestimate the so-called normal people around them. He had to bear that in mind that from now on. Though he had a suspicion Watson would be on hand to remind him of it for a while yet if this worked.

 _Of course it would work._ There was a recorder under the blanket and a spare just in case Moriarty wanted to do a lengthy monologue. A good villain always went into a monologue when they gloated. He needed her to gloat like never before, to hold her victory over him and offer to remould him in her image because she seemed to want him just a little more when he was broken and ready for her to pick up all his fragmented pieces. He supposed that that too was a kind of love.

Sometimes, he wondered what it would have been like if he had acquiesced to her demand. He had no doubt they would have made an attractive couple, the kind that received stares on the street. The sex would have been great--he knew it from experience. ( _Watson, I can see you rolling your eyes. She probably wasn’t faking it sixty percent of the time._ ) The challenges as they made the puppets dance to their tune would stimulate them both and keep their love alive. And they would have been the most successful, morally bankrupt life-partners ever. 

But he preferred to have certain constraints in his life. It would be too easy to give in and let her win. 

He was like her in so many ways including this one. Except that he had a “mascot”. His morality pet, as she had correctly identified Watson. Such a _limiting_ label though. That was one of the pit-falls of labelling people and expecting them to remain quietly in their boxes.

It was a good thing he _liked_ being restrained though. Mentally more than physically, really, but when was it _not_ about mind-games?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the end, it was just another addiction he had to be weaned off. Watson would say that that was what sober companions were for, but she was not his sober companion any more.

He wondered if Watson knew where the term _the bee’s knees_ originally came from and how it had changed over time . . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


	2. First Do No Harm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Watson had recognised Irene as a potential trigger when Sherlock had staggered against her in shock when they beheld the woman, alive and painting at the address they had been given. She had no idea of just _how_ triggering Irene Adler could be.

People could be addictive. Sherlock’s obsession with the late Irene Adler had been unhealthy. The fact that she was not dead after all had not change that one bit.

Irene Adler, the woman who did not exist. Irene Adler, the woman who had played her and Sherlock like an expert fisherman. That was probably not even her real name.

She should have known, having some notion of Sherlock’s innate idealism, that his idea of a perfect woman was just that. An _ideal_ that could not be real.

But she had been blindsided at the beginning. She only had her first inkling that something was wrong when Sherlock announced that he would be leaving New York to get Irene out of the metaphorical crosshairs.

Sherlock _never_ gave up in the middle of a case. Her instincts were telling her that this was _wrong_. He was not acting like Sherlock anymore.

They had not seen it coming. Like a freight train about to derail at full speed. Irene was Moriarty. Irene was not real.

It did not change anything though. Sherlock was still fixated on her. Fixated on defeating Moriarty because he did not know how to deal with that sort of betrayal. He could not deal with being so expertly manipulated on all levels because his pride would not let him.

Sherlock really did not go for the non-addictive drugs.

Joan Watson had not been afraid when faced with Moriarty across the table at the Four Seasons. This look suited her a lot better than poor, traumatised Irene Adler. Irene _who did not exist anywhere except in Sherlock’s memory and Moriarty’s imagination_ Adler. In killer heels and a power hairdo.

_Detective, deduce._

Moriarty’s taste in footwear and clothing was revealing. She liked control. Or the look of being in control at least. No wonder Sherlock had been drawn to her. She had been subtly giving off British dominatrix vibes even as faux-American Irene Adler. Watson wondered if it was deliberate or subconscious.

_“Do you want to sleep with him?”_

Oh _really_? What was this, high school? She glared at Moriarty, willing her eyes to say _Is that all you’ve got?_ She would not be rattled. Moriarty had fired a cheap shot to get her to react. So Joan would react, just not in the way she was expected to.

_“Mascot”, huh._

It _might_ be true that women were harder to read. She did not want to agree with Moriarty on anything, but she could give her this one generalisation.

Watson analysed Moriarty as she would any other suspect on a case. The desire to win, rather like Sherlock. Constantly into games of one-upmanship, sort of like Sherlock. Always up for a challenge--that was Sherlock all over. And if it was morally dubious, all the better--not like Sherlock. 

All right _mostly_ not like Sherlock. She knew Sherlock always lived on the edge and clung onto the idea of justice like a lifeline. He was toeing the line at the moment. By _choice_. It had been close with Sebastian Moran though. Too close. No doubt the fact that he had almost crossed the line to avenge an imaginary woman gnawed at him constantly now that he knew the truth.

Moriarty was too close. Too raw a wound for Sherlock to overlook. He might look focused, but Moriarty had thrown him off his game. She was brilliant at mindfucking after all. It probably got her going more than actual fucking. Always with the mind games . . .

It was true that Moriarty and Sherlock were almost perfect copies of each other, seen through a warped and fractured glass. Oh . . . and it was then that Joan Watson deduced the one thing that Moriarty was wilfully blind to.

She did not call it a weakness. It was not a weakness to love or to want someone like yourself to be with you.

But she was not sure about that sort of love.

She had read about the dynamics of dominant and submissive play. ( _What? Sherlock, I was trying to get to know you better after seeing the dominatrix leaving the brownstone._ ) The surprising thing had been how she had agreed with most of it. Or perhaps it should not have been _that_ surprising. The central tenet of consensual play was _Do no (lasting) harm_ after all. And provide aftercare.

That was not the kind of game Moriarty was playing with Sherlock. Her games meant that someone was going to get very badly hurt in the process. It did not require Sherlock’s deductive reasoning to figure out who was going to lose if they went down that road.

Moriarty wanted Sherlock to lose and know it. To toy with him because he was the only one who seemed to understand her warped genius. All artists liked to have an audience and by all accounts, that had been the one thing about Irene Adler that Moriarty did not have to fake.

This had nothing to do with her personal opinion about how Sherlock and Moriarty did not love in the conventional sense. This was not about how even she could see that they would be unstoppable if Moriarty could break Sherlock down and get him to play her way. Screw the end results, it was the _process_ that mattered.

Joan Watson was damned if she was going to let Moriarty play that game without interference. She was not a naturally antagonistic person, but she took offense when someone was trying to break someone she had been trying to keep together.

That was the thing about being a caregiver. You could not stop caring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She had been angry at the murders as well. They had been so . . . _pointless_. All that wasted potential.

But she was, had been, a surgeon. It was easy to step back into old habits, to detach herself from the immediate crisis and focus on getting things done. Sherlock could not, would not detach. So she had to be the one to keep her head.

It went against her nature and her training to leave someone in so much pain--both physical and mental--but he needed closure more than he needed a nice quiet room to rest and recover in. She knew him that well--she had told Captain Gregson that she would pull him back when she thought he was going too far.

Not as his sober companion. Not even as his friend. She was his partner now and she knew his limits.

She knew he had been pushed too far when he started getting violent at the station. This had to stop. _He_ had to stop. Moriarty had to be stopped.

 _Priorities_.

So she told him what she knew. He was a good actor. He could be trusted to pull it off. Captain Gregson and Detective Bell would help them.

She tried not to feel like an enabler when she told him about Irene’s need to win with him as her captive audience. But she was not about to let anyone mess up her pa--partner after all this time. She was sorry that love had to be a victim and a hostage. Who was she to judge, really? But she had held lives in her hands before--she could handle the tough decisions. Even if it involved dangling Sherlock out like a juicy worm on a hook.

_Make the call, Joan._

And if a fake meltdown got Sherlock down on a hospital bed for a few days, she could square it with herself. She could live with the person she had become.

She had never wanted to become the person who said, _“It’s for your own good.”_

To her surprise, Sherlock _let_ her pull him back from the edge. Let her keep him in check for the endgame.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was good that he had hobbies, she thought as she joined him at his rooftop apiary. It allowed him to focus on other things. It took the edge off and exercised his keen eye for detail.

The new hybrid bees might not be a species yet, but she would take the gesture as it was intended. The biologist in her admired the new life in wonder. As gifts went, this was probably the most unique.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . Well played, Elementary writers, well played. I almost started hating the show in the first few minutes of the finale what with all the tropes thrown all over the place.
> 
> (My inner biology major is still grumbling that a bunch of hybrid bees is not necessarily a species yet until they can successfully reproduce though.)


	3. Hypothesis Testing

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She had been slightly disappointed at how easy it had been at first. It had been child’s play to manipulate Sherlock into thinking what she wanted him to think. To play on his rampant ego and his obsession with a dead woman who never existed.

Her guise had been carefully chosen to get under his skin and she had even factored in the good doctor in her calculations. Joan Watson did not like seeing people in pain. So much so that she had become a nanny to an overgrown man-child.

Mind you, Sherlock had been _her_ overgrown man-child to begin with. She wondered just how much influence Joan Watson had over Sherlock Holmes. And was it enough to curb his . . . darker impulses?

It was time to test her hypothesis.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It had been interesting when her charade faltered. She had miscalculated when she omitted Sherlock’s eye for detail from the equation. It had been one of the things that had drawn her to him after all and he had been one birthmark away from solving it.

But even then the best he could come up with was _How long have you been working for Moriarty?_

 _Oh Sherlock . . ._ She found herself rather cross with him for being such a stick in the mud and so _parochial_ to boot after almost deducing the truth.

Blinded by their shared past. Blinkered by convention. A mind as sensitive as his could be a weakness unless he utilised it properly. He was not using it properly because he could not see beyond the walls she had helped him to build. He had only surprised her by the depths he had sunk to when he though she was dead.

She had not wanted the reveal to come so soon, but a small part of her had wanted him to find out on his own. For him to deduce that she had played him all along. Unravelling the layers of deception she had wrapped herself in to discover that she was more than just a free-spirited art thief. He would have appreciated her original work just a little more that way.

Oh well. She could accommodate this additional variable. And the other variables he had surrounded himself with.

Sherlock was lucky in friends, if they could be called his friends. But all the friends in the world could not save him if Moriarty played her cards right.

Joan Watson was not afraid of her even though she knew what Moriarty was capable of.

_Refreshing._

The nanny was a lion, up in arms over her games and so indignant about the state those games had put Sherlock in. Part of that anger was over the use of her mother and brother to draw her out. But most of it was for Sherlock. Dr. Watson had dug the bullet out and stitched him up--Moriarty was sure of it.

As far as she could tell, Joan Watson was who she appeared to be. Guilt-ridden surgeon, dutiful daughter and guardian of other lost souls.

But the eyes that glared at her from across the table did not belong to one of those insipid saints with their limpid eyes turned towards heaven. Saint Joan looked like she wanted to charge the walls with her teeth and bare hands. Moriarty thought that she would not look out of place in chainmail, sitting astride a charger on a battlefield. Yet the other woman expressed no obvious moral superiority as she glowered--strange for a professional do-gooder.

Dr. Watson was holding herself back, not deigning to lower herself to violence despite her goading. Or perhaps she guessed that Moriarty was physically able to defend herself. Even someone who knew all the vulnerable points on the human body needed to be fast enough to strike at them before their opponent retaliated. 

Physical battles were out, mental and verbal sparring was on.

Based on research and brief observations, Joan Watson was mostly heterosexual, leaning towards men. So she tried to rattle the good doctor’s cage by asking if she wanted to bed Sherlock. Watson merely scowled at her mulishly over the tableware and issued a riposte of her own.

Perhaps she should have asked if Joan Watson was discovering a latent attraction to her own sex. Or perhaps she would like to swap shoes? Doctor Watson had been appraising her hair and her clothing, most likely trying to apply deductive reasoning on her. The probability that the doctor was checking her out lay well below twenty per cent. 

It was all _packaging_ anyhow. People saw what Moriarty wanted them to see.

Moriarty allowed herself to be amused as she prodded and poked. Sherlock had tried to take on an apprentice. To mould someone else into a facsimile of himself. People like Sherlock and herself were not _tutored_. People like them were _born_. Joan Watson was born to care.

Caring was not a weakness. It provided motivation and leverage. Even the average run-of-the-mill opportunist could use it to his own advantage. Just look at the number of people who would bend over and commit murder for the sake of a loved one.

Caring had driven Joan Watson to stand at Sherlock’s right shoulder for as long as she had. Caring had got her into deeper water than she had expected, but she was still bristling at someone who could have her killed in the next five minutes.

 _So what are you going to do about it, Dr. Watson?_

Better that Saint Joan bring Sherlock to heel before he got hurt. Moriarty knew from their one meeting that Joan Watson had more steel in her spine than a lot of criminals in the business. But she would not want another close acquaintance injured or killed if she could help it. Sherlock also had a soft spot for the people he trusted--this she knew intimately. Moriarty had enough leverage to crack them both wide open.

Things were getting . . . predictable.

_Come on, surprise me . . ._

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joan Watson probably wore that focused, slightly distant look when she went into the operating theatre. A part of Moriarty’s mind admired how composed the doctor’s face was as she appeared at the door with the uniformed officer. She was not triumphant, merely engrossed in getting the job done. A part of her itched to pick up her brush and palette.

( _I’ve trained and conditioned myself to appreciate beautiful things, Sherlock. Dr. Watson has a charming array of freckles._ )

The rest of Moriarty’s thought processes were involved in picking apart how she had been set up to fall so neatly. The implosion. The overdose. Even the beating and robbing of a drug dealer. All of it so obviously a false trail meant to make her think that he had spiralled out of control again. 

That she had broken him again. That he was hurt, lost and in so much pain. What did it say about her that she liked him beaten? She would have bet a large amount of money that Joan Watson had a few choice words on that subject.

She had avoided Dr. Watson while she fretted outside Sherlock’s ward. She did not want to cause a scene. Distracting the guard on duty and slipping in unseen required a few bribes, but it was nothing unseemly. She had then laid out her offer again, confident that Sherlock was close to seeing things her way now.

But the joke was on her all along. She appreciated how simple it was.

She should have expected some originality from the nanny precisely because she was so mundane and ordinary. Oh but Dr. Watson _was_ mundane and ordinary in every way except one. She did not plan, she did not plot. There were no long-term plans to stymie, there were no complicated plots to defeat. Joan Watson merely _reacted_ and left her queen out in the open as bait. 

Perhaps admiring the Grand Masters and the Renaissance Men for too long had made her stagnant. Unable to conceive of anyone else who could surprise her with such a transparent ruse.

Dr. Watson knew that it was not a weakness to love. But like Moriarty, she had figured out how to exploit it. Had she not made it a point of her career to prove that she could exploit anything if she put her mind to it?

She could find some amusement in the irony of it all . . . It was not about how complex or impressive your brain was. It was how you used it that mattered.

Her mistake was thinking that the physician was the cautious one. She had thought that the rogue probability that Joan Watson represented was too small to be factored in. But Joan Watson had never been uncertain of her mission or infirm of purpose. She had _known_ that Sherlock never needed an angel on his shoulder to keep him from falling. Just one of her helpful hands.

Moriarty wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Defeated by random variables.

At least life would be interesting for the next month or so. She had hypothetical and actual plans in place should she ever be arrested and incarcerated.

Perhaps she should have led with _“You haven’t slept with Sherlock. Is it because you prefer women after all?”_ back at the restaurant. Joan Watson might have surprised her even then.

She found herself wanting to be surprised again as she was led away.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . And I'm done.
> 
> I think the whole of plot _Elementary_ Season One was the only time I was okay with a Sherlock/Irene romance with Irene as the villain because Irene Adler never existed until Moriarty created her to snare Sherlock. The role of the intelligent woman using her wits to protect and defend herself and the people she cared for (canonical Irene Adler--the opera singer who loves Godfrey Norton and was trying to escape the King of Bohemia) was fulfilled by Joan Watson.


End file.
